257: Innovating through Empathetic Collaboration with Turi McKinley

Pete Mockaitis
Turi, thanks so much for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Turi McKinley
I’m happy to be here. Thank you for inviting me.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, certainly. Well, so tell me, I understand you worked on a wide array of products, and I was intrigued by maybe some lessons learned when it comes to doing deodorant bottle design.

Turi McKinley
Oh, that’s an old one. Yeah, sure. So, we did a project, I think this must’ve been maybe six or eight years ago, but it was a U.S. client, it was a consumer packaged-goods client, and they were interested in understanding how they could change their products to be appropriate for the market in Mexico and South America. Very different areas but we first went to Mexico.

And the challenge, the thing that had happened in the market that they felt they needed to respond to was one of their competitors a couple of years ago had taken the deodorant bottle, particularly for the roll-on kind, and turned it upside down. And they did that because there was an insight that customers, when they buy these fluid products, like toothpaste and things like that, they want to get the last drop out of it. Literally, they want to squeeze the last drop out of the bottle.

So, with the roll-on where you can’t do that, turning the bottle upside down, very simple design change, helps the customer think, “Wow! With that product I’m going to get every last drop of that fluid deodorant out of that bottle.” So, they wanted us to help them understand how they could respond to that in Mexico and these other markets.

So, we went, and I think the design of the bottle was an interesting thing, and we came up with some really great solutions. But, for me, as somebody who comes from a research background, my background is in anthropology and design, what was really fascinating was observing how different the cultural context for sweating is in Mexico than it is in the States or Europe.

So, in Mexico you have a much more socially-stratified society, and being a laborer, being somebody who is outside and who is sweating visibly through their clothing has a really strong social context or social sense of being lower than other people. So, sweating rises all of those, that nervousness, concerns about being sweaty, and being seen as somebody who might have to be outside or be a laborer.

So, we started to observe these patterns where people were buying six or seven bottles of deodorant at a time. They were buying one for their gym bag, one or two or three or four at home to have a spare in case they ran out, one for their desk at the office, and one that they were taking with them out to the club because even if it wouldn’t stop them necessarily from sweating, the sense of reapplying the deodorant was necessary for calming that real strong sort of cultural nervousness about being seen to sweat.

Pete Mockaitis
Fascinating.

Turi McKinley
Very different than like my high school experience with realizing that sweat was an issue, you know.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so then, when it comes to design, I guess there’s an upside down bottle as what how one competitor reacted to it, but I guess in another context in which it’s like, “Sweat means you’re a loser,” I don’t mean to put words in your mouth, but I mean, if I’m just going to really dumb it down and simplify so it becomes all the more critical to have it on hand everywhere. What do you do with that?

Turi McKinley
Well, you start thinking about, “Okay. Now, if we’ve observed this reason, this desire for protection from sweat, it’s not so much about deodorant, it’s not even so much about anti-perspirant. It’s protection from that social connection with being lower class.”

I can’t sort of tell you exactly what the solution was with the client went forward with, but some of the solutions we came up with were things that are really were portable that could go out into the club setting. So, if you think of, do you remember those strips that you would put on your tongue that would dissolve and they would have like – what’s it called?

Pete Mockaitis
The Listerine Cool Mint PocketPaks?

Turi McKinley
Listerine. Yes, those Listerine Cool Mint PocketPaks.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m looking at one right now. I’ve got them near my desk.

Turi McKinley
Right. And those packets, they speak to portability, right? You can put it in your pocket, in your bag, you can have it at your desk as you do. It’s very easy and you don’t have to fuss with liquid or spilling or any of that. So, if you take that kind of format and that kind of technology, now think about that around your underarms. Could we design something that would enable somebody to have that super portable pack to        freshen up when they are on the go, something that’s not a bottle stuck in their pocket when they’re out at the club, or in their purse?

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Turi McKinley
So, those were some of the kinds of directions that you start moving when you have the capability as a team to be able to say, “Our client makes fluid deodorant.” Okay, so the client wants a solution that’s about selling more fluid. But let’s take a step back, let’s really try to understand the person who they want to buy this product, and understand the cultural context, the emotional context within which they work, and identify a solution that will be really appropriate to them.

So, doing that research, spending time with people, and having as a team the freedom and the openness to look for the right solution, not necessarily the solution that the client has asked for, is one of the most important skills that I think has enabled Frog to be as successful as it has in the 13 years that I’ve been here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s cool. And, I guess, you’ve already got sort of a leg up on sort of my next question. I just want to get oriented a little bit. So, can you tell us a little bit about Frog design and your role as the Executive Director of Org Activation?

Turi McKinley
Sure. So, I’ll give you a little bit of a background on Frog itself. Frog is, we’re about 45 years old now, maybe a little more than that, but maybe 50 years. But we were founded in the late ‘60s in Germany as an industrial design firm, and our founder, Hartmut Esslinger, had a point of view on design which was that form should follow emotion.

Basically, we need to make products that are emotionally resonant to people, that speaks to who they are and to their needs. And if you think of German design back in the late ‘60s, it was form follows function, and the Bauhaus, and all of that kind of sometimes inhuman but very functional design.

Pete Mockaitis
I have the Dyson voice in my head now and I just can’t… vacuum cleaners is just there. German design equals Dyson. It’s just there.

Turi McKinley
I can see that. So, with that ethos of form follows emotion, Hartmut ended up meeting Steve Jobs back in the ‘80s, and they partnered to create the design language for the first Apple computers, and that relationship is also when Hartmut decided to relocate the company from Germany to California which is where our headquarters are today.

But it also started our engagement with the digital era. The Apple computer, if you think of emotional design in computing, that was really in many ways continues to be one of the best examples of design that people have an emotional relationship with. So, for frog, as we started working with digital, that idea of form following emotion was still very much a part of our design.

And I joined frog about 13 years ago, and at that time, I think digital and industrial design or physical design were kind of separate, but they were starting the movement that we really see having taken full force today of convergent design where you’re no longer a designer who is designing for a little black box, a digital designer designing for a little screen inside of a box. You are now thinking about the full experience of a product or service regardless of whether it’s a physical, digital, or otherwise off-screen experience.

So, frog, as a company, still has that human-centered design very much at the core of what we do. But, today, we really are a company that designs human experiences, and we’re trying to design these experiences that transform businesses and transform markets.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Cool. Well, designing human experiences sounds like a whole lot of fun. I like being a human and experiencing it and creating stuff, so that’s good. And now, I want to talk about some particular skills that any professional can use based upon your unique area of expertise. I first discovered you through the LinkedIn Learning Lynda.com course about Learning Design Thinking, and I just knew, it’s so funny, I knew the design thinking was really cool.

So, it’s like I remember I had a little training on design thinking for like one hour when I was working in strategy consulting, and they’re like, “This is like the completely other way to think about things,” as opposed to how strategy consultants, we have a hypothesis and we gather our data and we validate it or refute it, and then we refine.

It’s sort of like, “Design thinking is a whole another way to run you brain.” I was like, “Well, that’s cool.” So, I’d love it if you could sort of orient us a little bit to what is design thinking and how is that potentially useful for professionals?

Turi McKinley
Sure. So, design thinking these days is a term that gets written about a lot, and people are very interested in it. I think there’s sometimes a temptation to think of design thinking as a kind of magic. In many ways, design thinking is how you approach problem-solving. So, when I think of design thinking, there’s kind of four things that are the key components.

I think of design thinking as fundamentally a very making-based approach to problem-solving, and when you think of problem-solving that is design that’s rooted in human empathy and that’s done by collaborative teams of people who come from many different skillsets. As I was talking about frog as a company that today is designing for the physical world, for the digital world, for experiences that might suffuse a theme park, or influence a multinational company.

Design today, or problem-solving today, is so complex that it really can’t be solved by just one diva designer who has a great idea. You need to solve problems by having people of many different skillsets looking at the problem and being able to work together to understand the problem space, to understand and have empathy with the people who will use the product.

And one of the best ways to actually activate all those different skillsets and minds is by making prototypes together, trying it out, talking about, “We understand what the deodorant example. We now understand the social context within which deodorant operates within Mexico. We can talk to the person who might be able to make the strips and understand what’s the possibility here that we could find a solution that would be something that doesn’t exist on the market today.”

I think the difference with some of those traditional business approaches that you mentioned are that, traditionally, businesses are very good at taking a very structured approach to saying, “These are our business capabilities. This is what we’re good at. This is where we have a strength in the market. This is perhaps a new technology that we’ve created, or something that we want to sell. Now, let’s take that new technology, take our business capabilities, package them together and make a new product.”

They tend to be very good at that. They also tend to be very good at kind of incremental innovation, “If this is happening in the market now, we think that the next thing that will happen will be this. Let’s go test that hypothesis. Let’s match that to our business capabilities and let’s launch it.”

A design-thinking approach fundamentally starts from a different place. The problem might be, “How do we grow into a new market?” But, instead of starting with the business capabilities, you start by understanding the people in that new market, whether it’s somebody who is suffering from a rare form of a disease, or if somebody who is a Gen Z teenager now and we’re looking at a product that might be launched for them in five to 10 years, both of those are recent projects. But you start with the people and you use that to help you understand what might be.

Pete Mockaitis
What might be, just like in terms of what is, like the reality they’re in?

Turi McKinley
Well, yes. So, I think human empathy begins with understanding how people see the world around them. Understanding the business is about understanding the world within which the constraints, the opportunities, the strengths within which the business operates. Looking at the market is about seeing trends and what’s happening whether the new technologies, new opportunities that are shaping society, but fundamentally to get to an innovative new idea.

You, as a group, or as a team, need to be able to say, “What if.” You need to be able to take all that foundation, those constraints, that knowledge, that empathy and take the kind of lateral thinking leap to say, “Maybe this could be. What if this is where the world goes in five years? How will my company have an amazing relationship with its customers in five years if the world changes this way?

How might I change my relationship with my brand’s relationship with the market if I launch this new type of product?” that kind of thing.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so I’m thinking about maybe zooming in here on an example. Let’s say we got a professional, and I’m thinking about sort of mostly innovations that we can do sort of on a weekly, monthly, quarterly basis. I think some will be creating a whole new products and services that individuals will be purchasing.

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But I think more often the innovation has to do with processes that are happening in the realm of the regular work week, in terms of, “You know what? This is kind of dumb. Surely, we can do this better,” whether that’s, “Does anyone read this report?” or, “Are we making the best use of our meeting times?” or, “Wow! Email is sort of taking over our lives. Is there a better way?” So, maybe, could you maybe walk us through how a design-thinking style process might go down to refresh and replace a process that happens in a real place?

Turi McKinley
Sure, yeah. The work that I do with frog at the moment is very much focused on helping companies make those kind of changes.

Pete Mockaitis
Perfect.

Turi McKinley
Yeah, the Org Activation practice at frog is taking kind of what we’ve learned around what makes companies successful, and there’s three major things that we’ve been seeing that make companies successful. The first is that ability to take a human-centered design approach not just to your products and services, but to how your organization is structured.

The second is if companies are not able to really have the nimbleness to sense and respond what is happening in their relationship with their customer, very rarely can they be successful. And then, the third piece is that companies need to have the ambidexterity to have a small part of their business that’s really focused on thinking about where the market might go and taking big risks even as the whole organization might be much more focused on the moment and incremental change.

But to get there, to get to a company that has that ambidexterity, that nimbleness and that empathy, you’re right, often a lot of internal processes within the organization need to change. If we take an example, like you mentioned, around meetings. Are we doing it right? Are we getting what we need to out of the meeting? Are we able to get all those different voices actually listening to each other? Or is there something within our process or our way of work that is more focused on shutting people down than really enabling us to get to some shared ideas?

So, when I think of a good process for design thinking, there’s a couple of things that really stand out. One is that the teams need to be clear about the goal that they are attacking or that they’re going after. We tend to think in large businesses that the company strategy has given us a goal or the ask from our manager that we’re all aligned on. But that’s not necessarily the case.

Those things exist and they’re very important, but for a team to work together effectively they need to have the ability to set some shared goals together. So, one of the most important aspects of kicking off a design thinking relationship within a team is having the ability to talk about, “As a group, what are the goals that we have together that we want to achieve here? Yes, there’s the business goal, but what is the broader goal that we’re trying to achieve?” So, whether it’s a meeting or whether it’s a six-month process, having the time as a team to set some goals is really important.

One of the other kind of key aspects to design thinking is having a shared space. When I was saying kind of key aspects of design thinking, one of them is about collaborating, and the other is about making together.

Turi McKinley
I think with design thinking, it needs to be both collaborative and it needs that aspect of prototyping together and making solutions. So, having a shared space where your team is able to come back to use the walls, use the space to externalize the thoughts that you’ve had around, “how we’re going to solve this problem and work together off screen, face to face,” is sometimes an unrealized but very important part of effective design thinking. It’s having a shared space where you can work together to solve the problems.

Another key piece of the process is about having the ability to get out and build that human empathy with the users of your product or service. That might be having somebody who understands design research on your team. It might be having the tools within your company that enable you to get out and actually have a connection with your users.

But even without special teams, even without special tools within the company, the team itself needs to have a bias that, “The best way I can solve this problem is to understand how people think and feel about this problem, so that is both in the discovery process of what am I trying to solve, but also in the iteration of solutions.”

Pete Mockaitis
And that seems quite a sensible starting place. Could you maybe contrast that with is there a common practice that starts from a different place? And what is that in terms of just shining a bright light on the key distinction to make here?

Turi McKinley
Yeah, very often programs start with, or teams often start with the business requirements and the business constraints for the problem that they’ve been asked to address. And, ideally, the team that has design thinking at their heart will take the business requirements and the business constraints as one part of the discovery of the problem that they need to solve.

The other part that they will find a way to bring in is that human empathy so they can begin to, as a team, start thinking about, “What do I need to achieve for the business? What do I need to achieve for the user? And bringing in that multidisciplinary voice, what are the opportunities that technology begins to offer me to make those solutions?” And I’m speaking about technology broadly here. It might not be digital technology, but the how it’s solving the problem. When you bring those three things together, that’s where you find the best solutions.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Understood. And so, then, maybe could you help bring this to life a bit in terms of, “Hey, here was a process within an organization that got refreshed or replaced via using a process just like this”?

Turi McKinley
Sure. We did some work several years ago now with GE. And GE, it’s one of the world’s most successful companies. It’s been around for a long time. They have an incredible engineering organization, and they also have a really interesting management structure where they move people around through the organization, and have a real focus on educating their teams.

But in 2010, GE discovered that, through an industry report, that by revenue they were the world’s 14th largest producer of software – by revenue. And when they looked at that, and they looked at GE software and the kind of services that they provided, they realized that while GE’s engineering is really about they make amazing things that spin, you know, train engines, drills, airplane engines, but a lot of the revenue was actually coming from the analysis of the data that comes off of those spinning things.

And GE had evolved in software practice very much in silos to respond to clients’ ask for, “I need to visualize this data. Make me a piece of software.” So, it’s a very reactive practice. And when they took a look at their revenue, they realized that that revenue could be under threat from a company like IBM that’s very good at processing data and information and providing analytics.

So, they made a very large investment to create GE’s software backbone, the industrial internet that GE has launched recently. But they realized that in parallel to that, that this software initiative would not be able to succeed if they didn’t build a culture within the organization that understood user experience, both at the management level and at the team levels. So, they needed to find new processes, new ways of thinking, new ways of work that would enable their product owners and engineering teams to understand the user of software.

So, we worked with them over the course of a couple years to help them identify within their very successful processes, “What were the things that needed to change to enable a culture of user experience to flourish within the organization? And what were the specific kinds of tools that could be created to really be positive actors that would help people take on these new ways of thinking and new ways of acting?”

Turi McKinley
So, GE needed to develop a set of processes and ways of thinking that would help their teams understand the users of GE software. So, we’re talking about oil field managers, we’re talking about people who manage fleets of aircraft engines, people who are responsible for servicing, managing the servicing of those kinds of devices.

There were many different things that we did, but I think one of the most surprising changes that helped begin to build the design-thinking attitude within the GE teams was, oddly enough, the creation of a PowerPoint. So, we created a PowerPoint that it’s not a PowerPoint that was used in presentation. It was a PowerPoint presentation that was meant to be used by a salesperson when they went out to talk to the customer who might be buying a fleet of aircraft engines.

Hidden in the margins of that PowerPoint were a range of different little elements that the salesperson could use in having a discussion with the client to build a dashboard for the data that would be displayed by their software. The reason this was important from a human-centered design perspective was GE salespeople were accustomed to saying, “This is what we can do. Of those things, what do you want?” Or, having their customer tell them, “I need this thing. Go build this thing for me.”

So, by enabling, by building a tool which supported a conversation of needs and opportunities, we were able to help the salespeople begin to talk about something they were very unfamiliar with, with their customers which was what software might be able to provide that customer.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. Okay.

Turi McKinley
So, the design thinking aspect of that is really on two parts, and when you are trying to change an organization you need to be able to think of the end-user, in this case that oil field manager or the person buying a fleet of aircraft engines, but you also have to be able to solve for the mindset of the employee within the company, so in this case that was the GE sales team and how could we understand their needs and how they think about a problem to be able to find a tool or a way of work that would help them begin to shift their processes and how they approach their relationship with their customers.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Excellent. Thank you. Well, now, I’d love it if maybe we could just hear a couple of the super brilliant actionable tactics that you found effective in terms of you’re working with different types of folks and trying to get brilliant ideas and creative flow. What are some things that any professional might use to get some more brilliant ideas and thoughts flowing when they’re collaborating?

Turi McKinley
Yup. So, super tangibly, I’ve been surprised at how many client org of my clients have trouble getting things like Post-it notes or other media that enables externalizing ideas and rapid moving and sharing of ideas.

Not that it’s hard to go to your local store and buy some Post-it notes because they’re super common, but some of the organizations I’ve worked with, the process of procuring Post-it notes through the procurement system is very challenging. Like the procurement team may have said that, “There is a limit of the number of Post-its that your division or your group or the supply closet can have.”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, man. That drives me nuts.

Turi McKinley
Right. Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
That just kills my inner enthusiasm really. Oh, boy. So, once you got the Post-it notes…

Turi McKinley
Right. Once you got the Post-it notes what do you do with it? So, the reason you have a Post-it note is not to use it like a notebook, to have lots of things for Post-it notes. The reason you have a Post-it note is to put one idea on a piece of paper so that you can share it with other people on your team. So, as you think about how you process or how you share, because design thinking is about collaboration, it is about how you share ideas with your team, think about using your Post-it note to be just one idea on a Post-it note, and make one or two words big. The big idea.

Use it like a headline on your Post-it note. Even if you make a few other words below it. But think about your Post-it note as a tool for sharing an idea and for putting it out there so that it can be grouped with other similar ideas so that, as a team, you can come up with, hopefully relatively quickly, a way of understanding shared ideas.

The other sort of next upskill from that is the skill of beginning to, when you look at a group of Post-it notes, ask yourself, “What’s important here?” Fundamentally, being effective in design thinking or really just collaborating with the team, the people who are most successful in driving collaboration are able to synthesize what’s been said in the group and share it back to the group.

So, there was a creative director here in New York who has since left, and he was one of the people that I learned a vast amount from. He would, in a, let’s say, hourly-long meeting with a client, he might be not saying anything during most of the meeting, but I’d see him making some notes on a piece of paper in front of him, and then some time, usually in the last 15 minutes of the discussion, he would stand up and he would go up to the whiteboard and take the things that had sort of been circled and grouped and thought about, and he was able to take that red marker, draw the two lines between things, and say, “This is what’s important. This is what we’ve agreed upon. This is what we understand now from this meeting.”

So, when you are leading a design-thinking team, you are leading a team that is open to ambiguity, that is out there generating a lot of ideas, there’s Post-its everywhere, the Sharpies are flying, but if those ideas are not able to be understood in holistic sense and synthesized into some understanding of what’s important, or, “What do we want to investigate next?” you will not be effective as a design thinking leader.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Noted. Thank you.

Turi McKinley
I don’t know. As I think of tools from the very basic, having Post-it notes, to kind of the meta level, those are kind of the two layers. Having the tools, having the shared space, being in the room together is crucial. But as a team, you need to keep that goal in mind and you need to have the ability to synthesize information and ask yourself what’s important.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you. Well, Turi, tell me, is there anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Turi McKinley
Sure. I’m looking back at some of the questions you asked. When we were talking about physical space, one of the things that I think is really important with having a space for design thinking, is that the reason you’re in a space together is to take your ideas off screen and out of the air and put them into a format that can be shared by the team.

The reason you want to do that is that everybody is going to be coming to it with a different set of knowledge, and you want to create a format whereby people can share their knowledge and it can begin to be structured and synthesized into a new understanding.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Good. Okay. Well, then now, could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Turi McKinley
Let’s see, a favorite quote. You know, I was talking about synthesis and how important synthesis is in the design thinking process. Fundamentally, when you are designing something, you’re trying to solve a problem but you’re trying to make it real. So, I think one of the quotes that I really remember a lot is from Thomas Edison, and it’s, “Vision without execution is hallucination.”

So, as you’re working, the goal of anything that we do as designers is to make something real in the world. So, as much as we think of ideas and go open, we are going open, we are generating ideas in order to find the solution that we can build and bring to life in the market.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you. And how about a favorite book?

Turi McKinley
So, I’m really a fan of imaginative fiction so I’ve recently been re-reading a number of the Ursula Le Guin books. She asks very interesting questions in her fiction. I think the one I’ve been reading most recently is The Dispossessed, which is imagining that we are in a world where anarchy is the way of the social rule, and somebody from this anarchist planet goes to a planet that is a market economy, and the book is about his experience of that.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, interesting. Thank you. And how about a favorite habit, a personal practice of yours that helps you be effective?

Turi McKinley
I listen to a lot of podcasts. When I go to the gym, I find that TED Talks are the perfect length for my 20 minutes on the treadmill or the jogging machine, and I feel like I’m not wasting time as I kind of explore new ideas as I run in place.

Pete Mockaitis
Perfect. Thank you. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Turi McKinley
For me, on Twitter I am @turisays, T-U-R-I-S-A-Y-S, and @frogdesign is also great to follow on Twitter or LinkedIn, and visit our website.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And do you have a final challenge or call to action you’d issue to folks seeking to be awesome at their jobs?

Turi McKinley
I think being awesome at your job, the one thing I would say is figure out how you can be the best. I think my challenge would be that being able to synthesize what’s important is probably one of the most under-appreciated and most important skills that anyone working in a team can bring to the table.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you. Well, Turi, this has been a whole lot of fun. I wish you lots of luck and creative insights and a-ha moments in your design work and all that you’re up to.

Turi McKinley
Great. Thank you.